Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy

Description

Building on discussions originating in post-humanism, the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle, and the science of "species being of humanity" stemming from Marx's critique of philosophy, Katerina Kolozova proposes a radical consideration of capitalism's economic exploitation of life. This book uses Francois Laruelle's work to think through questions of "practical ethics" and bring the abstract tools of Laruelle's non-philosophy into conversation with other critical methods in the humanities. Kolozova centres the question of the animal at the very heart of what it means for us as human beings to think and act in the world, and the mistreatment of animality that underpins the logic of capitalism.

Katerina Kolozova is Director and Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Research and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University American College Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. She is the author of The Cut of The Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (2014).

We admit that animals are sentient beings and that they have rights, but we always treat them as abstractions. Katerina Kolozova makes us understand that it is philosophy that induces this belief, because philosophy is a denial of animals as it has been a denial of women. Moreover, these denials are conditions of the closing of philosophical systems. Kolozova urges us to transform our conception of philosophy by relating it to new, more generous concepts of woman and animal. * Francois Laruelle, author of Principles of Non-Philosophy, and Anne-Francoise Schmid, The New Centre for Research & Practice * Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals is a beautifully intense, challenging, and insightful bringing to bear of Laruellean non-philosophy, Marxism, feminism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the question of animal life under capitalism. Kolozova gives a spirited and utterly compelling defense of the claim that real human emancipation requires animal emancipation. * Rick Elmore, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Appalachian State University, United States * In this dense and compelling non-philosophical provocation, Kolozova persuasively argues that the complete expenditure of all animality (including humans, and those without language) is a precondition of capitalism and its metaphysics of self-sufficiency. Grounded in a Laruellian re-reading of Marx (that nonetheless strategically aligns itself with critical and anti-masculinist concepts like Haraway's 'cyborg'), this book tackles contemporary/popular accounts of humanism and post-humanism by offering a scathing critique of subjective philosophy and its logic of animal exploitation. * Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Professor of Political Theory, Western University, Canada *